A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

DVD sales fall poses challenge for Hollywood >> FT.comSales of new DVDs have collapsed, falling 20% in a year and presenting a significant challenge for Hollywood film studios, according to figures released on Monday. Worryingly for Hollywood, which has been grappling with many of the same issues that decimated the music industry, the decline of DVD sales, once the film industry's biggest revenue generator, has not been offset by other areas. Total sales from film-related "packaged goods", which include DVD and Blu-ray discs, fell from about $2.6bn to $2.1bn in the US, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, which represents film studios and consumer electronics companies." Suggestion is that it isn't piracy, but the shift to streaming. DVD rentals have also fallen sharply, by 36%.

Twitter Introduces Text Ads >> Labnol"Twitter is experimenting with sponsored text ads on their website that show-up just after the 'trends' section. The first round of text ads mainly promoted Twitter apps and other services built around the Twitter ecosystem but that is no longer the case. "Twitter's new ad format includes a website URL that takes you straight to the advertiser's website (NFL in this case) and there's a related hashtag to help you see related tweets on Twitter search. "A bit surprising thing about this new format is that nowhere does it says that these are advertisements or sponsored links."

The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale >> Coding HorrorFirst, be scared: Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, early SSD adopters, have seen them going down like ninepins. Average life: 12 months. So are they swearing off them? Not on your life. "Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don't even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it'd be like going back to dial-up internet or 13" CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!" Just have a good rotating backup.

Mac OS X Lion to feature iOS-like 'jiggling' app unistaller >> Unofficial Apple Weblog"New Mac users are commonly confused how to delete Mac apps. Coming from a PC, they are used to uninstallers and don't realize that one can (usually) simply drag any app to the Trash to delete it. The new uninstall feature in Lion is another sign that Apple wants to take the simplicity of iOS and apply it to the Mac in hopes of making OS X more familiar and intuitive to anyone using a Mac for the first time." Good point, since more people have used iOS than Mac OS. Also: Lion is becoming about as secret as a Windows beta.